Billion-Dollar Plan to Clean New York City Water at Its Source

The flow of drinking water to New York City begins as far away as a damp spot under some leaves on a mountainside 120 miles north of Times Square. For 155 years, the city has maintained a complicated network of reservoirs and aqueducts to carry rain and melted snow from distant hills to bathtubs in Brooklyn and sinks on Staten Island.

Now the purity of that flow faces the gravest threats ever, from both old sewage systems and a new wave of unbridled development in the watershed. To combat those threats, a growing force of scientists, engineers, special police officers and others from the city's Department of Environmental Protection has fanned out this summer across suburbs and farmland to explain and enforce the first new pollution rules for the watershed in 44 years.

They have 10 years and a billion dollars to fix faulty sewage treatment plants, to rebuild barnyards and pastures to control the flow of manure, and to buy tens of thousands of acres of land to build a buffer zone against encroaching development. Cities across the nation are developing programs to prevent pollution of drinking water at its source, but nothing approaches the magnitude of the cleanup that has just begun in the 2,000 square miles of hills and river valleys funneling water to the nine million people who use New York City's system.

But the grand experiment has shaky underpinnings: scientists have only an embryonic understanding of the forces that keep water pure or allow pollution to accumulate. And the plan depends on a fragile political alliance between rural upstate communities and New York City that can be upset at any time.

In essence, the city's task is to control three distant, sprawling regions where, since 1911, it has had the right under New York State law to limit water pollution. But for decades the main goal of city water officials was to increase the supply of water; its purity was rarely at issue. Now, the bureaucracy is forced to reinvent itself and to put the emphasis on cleanliness.

The Federal Government has made the rules clear: if the city cannot insure purity by managing the far-flung watershed, it will have to spend billions on a filtering plant. And while all involved emphasize that there are no health problems today with the flow of what a succession of New York City mayors have called ''the champagne of drinking water,'' the problems are mounting.

Already, 10 out of 19 reservoirs are chronically overloaded with unwanted nutrients, which are carried in runoff from pastures, parking lots and lawns and in waste water from more than 100 sewage plants. This excess phosphorus and nitrogen produces algae blooms, discoloration and foul odors. Lacking oxygen, the water in those 10 reservoirs no longer fosters biological activity to filter or destroy pollutants.

The amount of waste water flowing from rural and suburban sewage treatment plants into the reservoirs has doubled in 20 years, reaching 11 million gallons a day. In prosperous Westchester County villages like Katonah and poorer Catskills villages like Andes, thousands of antiquated septic fields leach waste into the water.

Around the reservoirs in the suburbs east of the Hudson River, asphalt parking lots and fertilized lawns are increasingly supplanting woodlands and wetlands, reducing the ability of soil and streams to clean the water naturally. And a new building boom is under way.

Despite the scope and cost of the watershed management plan, there are already signs that it may fall short of the goals set by the city and Federal environmental officials. Indeed, several senior state and Federal officials involved in the effort say it is already evident that the new pollution rules will have to be made stricter to insure that water quality does not decline.

If the plan falters, there will not be a day when city residents open faucets and suddenly find brown ooze. Instead, water experts say, there will be a steady decline in water quality, like the ancient torture of death by a thousand cuts, ultimately damaging economic growth and the quality of life.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said that when he took office in 1994, the threat of long-term water problems ''was one of the things that probably concerned me the most.''

''Water is critical to the ability of a city to have large numbers of people coming here, congregating, living,'' Mr. Giuliani said, adding that the cleanup would be intensified if necessary. ''This assures that 40 or 50 years from now our water will still be among the best in the country.''

Any tightening of the rules is likely to renew legal challenges by upstate communities around the reservoirs, which formally agreed to abide by the plan in January after years of fighting the city in court.

And surprises are already popping up. New research in the watersheds by city scientists has shown that the main source of a dangerous intestinal parasite, cryptosporidium, is apparently not farms or sewage plants -- as most water scientists had presumed -- but runoff from streets and storm drains in developed areas.

This means that the city's plans to eliminate barnyard runoff and add sophisticated filters to sewage plants may be misdirected.

Also, loopholes in the accord between the city and the watershed communities permit development to continue even around some of the most vulnerable reservoirs.

But even with the gaps and weaknesses, environmental officials at every level of government say that this cleanup is the last best chance of averting a 1992 Federal order to build what would be the world's largest filtration plant, for the 90 percent of city water that flows from reservoirs in the rural Catskills and the Delaware River Valley. Along with the estimated $5 billion construction cost, the plant would cost more than $300 million a year to operate, driving up city water and sewer rates even more than the steady annual rise of 7 to 9 percent during the last few years. Already, the city has committed to spending $825 million for a smaller filtration plant for its most degraded reservoirs, those in the Croton watershed, surrounded by the crowded suburbs of Putnam and Westchester Counties.

City water officials approached the new cleanup program with a queasy mix of doubt and hope.

As Ira Stern, the city's chief watershed diplomat, began a 100-mile drive early one morning to meet some village officials upstate, he described the importance of pushing ahead, despite the uncertainties.

''Common sense tells me that all the things we're doing add up to something,'' Mr. Stern said. ''But will you see a difference in a glass of water in the city? I don't know.''

His determination to make the plan work, he said, stemmed from one central, controlling thought. ''You really don't want to take chances with a lifeline like this,'' Mr. Stern said. ''You don't want to take chances when it's your water.''

The Plan

Wars Over Water, Upstate and Down

New York City's first water crisis occurred in 1832, when a cholera epidemic killed 3,500 people and an investigation disclosed that 100 tons of human waste was filtering into Manhattan's ground water each day, tainting the wells that were the only water source.

Two years later, the State Legislature granted the city the right to condemn land and obtain water rights in the pastoral regions to the north, areas that are now the densely populated suburban belt of Westchester and Putnam Counties.

By 1836, the first aqueduct and the city's Croton dam were being built, and almost immediately a tussle arose between resentful watershed residents and the thirsty city to the south.

After generations in which the city routinely condemned entire villages to make way for dams and reservoirs -- razing schools and churches, bulldozing farms, relocating cemeteries -- in January the city signed something of a peace treaty with its neighbors to the north that cleared the way for the watershed cleanup.

The deal emerged after 18 months of intensive negotiations among the city, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency, New York State and the communities around the reservoirs.

The need to negotiate -- instead of simply enact -- a cleanup plan grew out of the sharp shift in power in Albany since the turn of the century, when New York City controlled the State Legislature and easily gained the right to encroach on upstate communities for more water.

Now, the city depends on the cooperation of upstate legislators for programs ranging from rent control to education. The talks between ancient foes from upstate and downstate were brokered largely by Gov. George E. Pataki.

A critical element of the resulting plan is one of the most intensive land-buying programs ever undertaken in New York State, with $260 million earmarked for buying up to 355,000 acres as a buffer against encroaching development and the pollution it creates.

More than $200 million will be spent to improve treatment of waste water flowing into reservoirs from sewage plants, or to divert some of that flow out of the watersheds altogether.

Up to $35 million is being spent to clean up several hundred dairy farms. The farmers are voluntarily cooperating in hope that the improvements to their barns and pastures will help preserve their livelihood. City water engineers have learned that keeping clean farms in business is better for the reservoirs than shutting them down through onerous regulations and watching the land be sold off and split into suburban-style lots.

Under the deal, New York City also agreed to give watershed communities nearly $60 million to spur what it hopes will be ''environmentally sound'' economic development. Another $12 million in ''good neighbor'' payments -- essentially salve for old wounds -- has already gone to 35 watershed communities, which plan to spend the money on such needed oddments as a new firehouse roof, a pump for a community swimming pool and a road-paving program. In return, the communities have pledged to be partners instead of antagonists in the fight to clean the water that drains from their hills toward city taps. But not everyone has clasped hands eagerly: More than 100 landowners are now in court seeking a total of over $100 million in claims for lost value to their property because of the tighter pollution rules.

To insure that the water is protected, a new environmental enforcement division of the city's 93-year-old watershed police force is tracking down willful polluters, like a restaurant owner in Brewster who the authorities say tried to cut costs by pumping raw sewage from a storage tank into a storm drain leading to a reservoir.

These officers patrol country roads and condominium complexes around the reservoirs, carrying chemistry kits along with side arms, sniffing for failed septic tanks or watching streams for ribbons of toxic froth and fining or arresting the polluters.

This is a marked change from just a few years ago, when the city uniformly ignored or forgave polluters. In a telling shift, the program is run by Capt. Ronald A. Gatto, a 15-year veteran of the watershed police who six years ago testified before the City Council that supervisors had actively discouraged him from enforcing reservoir pollution laws.

The Problems

Rule Loopholes And Leaking Sewage

Within the sprawling Delaware, Catskill and Croton watersheds, the landscape ranges from crowded suburbs to pristine forests. Some of the water destined for New York City bubbles from mountainside springs, but some comes from the Croton Falls Reservoir, which receives 30,000 gallons of waste water daily from a Putnam County hospital's sewage treatment plant.

The watersheds stretch from the upper branches of the Delaware River in the west, near the Pennsylvania border, to the city line of Danbury, Conn., in the east. The area draining into the Pepacton Reservoir alone covers 370 square miles and includes more than 6,400 buried septic fields and 6 sewage treatment plants.

On a recent trip through the communities around the Pepacton Reservoir, Mr. Stern -- who is in charge of a newly created division of the Department of Environmental Protection dealing with water quality, planning and community affairs -- drove through Andes, which is seventh on a list of the 22 most important villages with failing septic systems. The city was going to pay nearly $14 million to replace all the old systems. But first it had to find them.

Passing through the village center, Mr. Stern waved at a row of quaint Colonial cottages tucked along a watershed stream. ''For all these homes,'' he said, ''no one really knows where the septic fields are.''

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And the Pepacton lies at the rural end of the system, where the population density is only 45 people per square mile. East of the Hudson River, around the reservoirs packed into the suburbs closer to New York City, the population density is 10 times that.

Altogether, New York City owns less than 4 percent of the watershed land area. In contrast, Seattle, for example, owns 92 percent of the forested land draining into its water supply.

The main goals of the new plan are to buy as much land around the reservoirs as possible, and to tighten rules governing pollution on land that the city does not own. But the negotiated settlement with the watershed communities includes significant loopholes, both in the rules and in the land-buying effort, according to a variety of environmental groups and some city officials.

Eric A. Goldstein, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private environmental group, said the gaps emerged because the closed-door talks leading to the watershed plan were too often focused on political and legal issues, and not often enough on chemistry and biology.

''There were 10 lawyers for every scientist in the room,'' said Mr. Goldstein, whose group was one of many that sought to participate in the talks, but were excluded.

One of the biggest weaknesses, Mr. Goldstein said, is that the plan allows an unlimited number of new sewage plants to be built in most of the Delaware and Catskill watersheds, a concession that could indirectly spur more growth and pollution.

He and other critics also say the plan is weak in its treatment of the threat from phosphorus, a nutrient that tends to wash into reservoirs mainly from sewage plants and storm runoff. Since 1993, the city's own top experts on water quality have been saying that the reservoirs' maximum allowable concentration for phosphorus must be cut by 25 to 50 percent to preserve long-term water quality.

In a strongly worded report in December 1993, the city water experts concluded, ''It is essential that more stringent standards for phosphorus loading to New York City reservoirs be adopted.''

But the new set of regulations keeps the maximum phosphorus concentration where it has been for decades.

The agreement also sharply restricts where the city can buy land for buffer zones. Watershed communities insisted on barring the use of any land within their incorporated limits, for fear that they would lose part of their tax base if New York City bought land with commercial potential. Critics say it will put glaring gaps in the buffer zone right in places where storm runoff and other sources of pollution are the greatest threat.

In addition, a ban on construction of impervious surfaces like parking lots extends only 100 feet from the banks of important watershed streams, and includes exemptions for commercially zoned areas.

In contrast, Boston -- one of the only other big cities with a substantial number of people living around its reservoirs -- allows no alteration of land within 200 feet of a reservoir tributary, with no exceptions.

Boston also allows no construction or filling of any wetland bordering a reservoir stream, no matter how small. In contrast, New York City's rules allow wetlands under 12.4 acres to be developed, Mr. Goldstein said.

Another threat comes from the intensifying construction of corporate parks, malls, movie multiplexes and subdivisions around the reservoirs after half a decade of relative inactivity.

More than 7,100 acres of land draining into city reservoirs in Putnam County -- the fastest-growing county in New York State -- is slated for development or has new construction under way, according to Nell Keeler, an analyst at Hudson Riverkeeper Fund, a private environmental group.

Several enormous construction projects, including the expansion of the International Business Machines Corporation headquarters and a new headquarters for Swiss Re, an insurance company, are under way near the most important reservoir in the system, the Kensico, a holding basin near White Plains that is the last stop for the clean water from the Delaware and Catskill systems.

Adding another element of uncertainty, relations between the city and some of its upstate neighbors, which had improved in the wake of watershed negotiations, are beginning to fray.

At a recent meeting of Putnam County's six town supervisors, Joseph Belvedere, the supervisor from Kent, gave what a colleague described as a ''call to arms'': a speech calling for the towns to coordinate a defense against the city as they seek new routes to growth.

Supporters of the watershed plan say the best feature is a provision that allows it to be strengthened in several years if little progress has been achieved.

But Daniel A. Ruzow, an Albany lawyer for the watershed coalition, said, ''The city can seek changes, but they know that puts everybody back at square one.''

Recreating an Agency

When Quantity Cedes to Quality

Perhaps the most critical element determining the fate of the city's water is the ability of the city Department of Environmental Protection to change its ways after decades of letting conditions around the reservoirs deteriorate.

Significant changes in the staff and structure of the 800-person water division of the department have been made by Mayor Giuliani in the last year.

Senior water officials say that the days when city water engineers spent off hours moonlighting as consultants for real estate developers are also fading.

But inside the widespread department bureaucracy, experts in water quality still sometimes do battle with engineers whose main concern is delivering water in quantity. Examples of problems have been disclosed both in investigations by private environmental groups like the Hudson Riverkeeper Fund, in audits by Alan G. Hevesi, the New York City Comptroller, and also in interviews with more than two dozen agency employees.

One city water engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was often a lack of urgency in identifying and solving problems. He said the skills of many talented biologists, engineers, and other experts in the agency -- some of the world's best -- are often squandered.

He described an incident last fall in which hundreds of gallons of fuel oil leaking from a storage tank at a library in Westchester seeped into the aqueduct carrying water toward the Bronx and Manhattan.

Even though some employees at the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx had to be evacuated because of strong fuel odors, the agency's response appeared to be following the old, slow pattern.

''I made three anonymous calls to the state spills hot line,'' the engineer said. ''That was the only way I could be sure it would get taken care of.''

He added: ''We squeaked by by the skin of our teeth. Nobody knew how to respond to the situation.''

David Gordon, an environmental lawyer for Riverkeeper, has ''Reservoir Keeper'' printed on his business cards. He spent two years deeply involved in the negotiations leading to the city plan and said he feels it is a good road map. But that map must be carefully followed if the water is to stay pure, he said.

''The deal does not lock in watershed protection,'' Mr. Gordon said. ''It locks in the right to protect the watershed. The D.E.P. now has that. But if D.E.P. doesn't function properly, this is just doomed.''

Joel A. Miele Sr., who was appointed Commissioner of Environmental Protection for New York City last summer, said his agency was becoming more integrated and would be able to carry out the ambitious water-protection plan. But he acknowledged that problems persist. ''Better horizontal communication is needed,'' he said. ''We've got to keep pushing.''

Watershed Allies

Common Worries Unite Former Foes

In large measure, the success or failure of the water plan rides on an assortment of New York City allies who have emerged in communities around the reservoirs. They are working to clean the water for different reasons: either to take advantage of the money coming from the city or because they have an inherent, separate interest in preserving open space or streams.

They range from fly fishermen eager to preserve trout habitat to suburban homeowners fed up with the persistent spread of strip development. One of the most unlikely supporters is Alan Rosa, the town supervisor of Middletown. Mr. Rosa once helped lead the coalition of watershed communities that fought the city for years in court. Now he helps run the Catskill Watershed Corporation, a nonprofit entity created under the agreement to dole out New York City money for economic development programs.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Rosa answered a steady string of phone calls about aspects of the watershed deal. Mainly, people were worried about the new regulations. ''A lot of people here feel we can fight them, but we can't,'' Mr. Rosa said. ''The state gave New York City the right to build, maintain and regulate a watershed. The best we can do is work with them.''

He said that the deal struck this year offered the only significant chance for watershed communities and the city to build a mutually beneficial relationship, but that it would be a slow process.

People came and went, including Beth Atkins, a schoolteacher from Margaretville, a postage-stamp village near the Pepacton Reservoir. She was worried about the septic field at a house she inherited. It was surely failing. Would she qualify for the city program to pay for replacing hundreds of old septic fields or would she face fines?

Mr. Rosa said she should be patient; the program would focus on known problems first. In crowded villages like Fleischmanns, a few miles away, the ground was essentially saturated with waste. There were more calls, and -- as always in the hills around the reservoirs -- there was an unexpected problem.

At 4 P.M. an undertaker arrived. A cemetery was crumbling into a watershed stream.